This invention relates generally to discovering, monitoring and managing network infrastructure resources, their status and configurations, and more particularly to automatically discovering, monitoring and managing resources in large multi-vendor, multi-class, and multi-layer enterprise networks and other infrastructures such as data centers and clouds.
In any network, determining resource configurations and monitoring the resources so that failures, configuration changes and network topology changes can be readily detected is a challenging task. In large multi-vendor, multi-class and multi-layer enterprise network infrastructures such as wide area and local area networks, data centers, and cloud-based environments may use a large variety of different types and sources of physical, logical and virtual resources. Discovering, monitoring and managing resources and configurations, particularly identifying resources and assets that are added, replaced or moved, is very difficult and even more challenging. Because such infrastructures are subject to continuous change and reconfiguration, it is difficult to maintain up-to-date information on configurations and resources. This makes troubleshooting and correcting failures, as well as replacing or reconfiguring resources to add new functionality, time-consuming and laborious. IT personnel must frequently spend significant time manually tracing and documenting configurations and resources to establish network baselines and to maintain these continuously updated and current in real time for network management and so that network operations can be monitored and restored in the event of failures. Practically, there are no convenient ways of doing this automatically or easily. There do not exist suitable automated methods and approaches for accomplishing these tasks.
It is desirable to provide systems and methods that address the foregoing and other problems associated with monitoring and management of resources and network infrastructures, and that provide for the automated continuous capture of the behaviors, configurations, and states of resources such as networking devices, non-networking devices, physical devices, logical devices and virtual devices located in multi-vendor, multi-class and multi-layer device infrastructures such as enterprise networks, data centers and public/private/hybrid cloud environments. It is to these ends that the present invention is directed.